Some Remarks on the Audenesque Self Viewed as a Product of the Inter-War English Domesticity
Some Remarks on the Audenesque Self Viewed as a Product of the Inter-War English Domesticity

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on the formation and predicament of the Audenesque self as a reflection of the inter-war English domesticity emerging from the discourse of the 1930s, especially from the poetry of the Pylon school: W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender. Eventually disillusioned with history, with the new ‘pyloned’ technological landscape, modern mass civilisation and high elitist culture, Auden’s generation of poets and writers sought their identity attempting to narrate their selfhood ‘in the low and dishonest decade’. Witnessing the paradoxical times of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the apocalypse and sterility of modernism, radical political, social, economic and moral changes, the Audenesque wobbling self strove to ‘set its lands in order’ and grasp its identity between life and art, domesticity and otherness.

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